Roger
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Posts posted by Roger
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Maybe we could all chip in and get one of these for Martin? I think he'd get a kick out of it:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Star-Trek-3D-P...news-17011.html
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LOL. Not sure what use that is, but might be fun to make anyway
One of the videos in the Youtube mosaic (not sure what else to call it) when the main one is done playing is for EEV Blog. Dave Jones cracks me up. "Oh! Beauty! We let the magic smoke out!"
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Ok, so this is the creepiest thing I've seen in a while -- a guillotine simulation. FYI there is some off-color language so if you are offended by that sort of thing, you probably shouldn't watch it.
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Here's a primer on it
http://www.investopedia.com/university/margin/margin1.asp
Historically, I think the percentage you could borrow was much higher in 1929 than it is today.
The risk of losing everything in margin trading is much greater because a stock doesn't need to drop to zero, it just needs to drop enough so that what you do own isn't enough to pay the brokerage firm back for what they loaned you.
I don't think the market is predictable enough to beat and I don't think anyone's research is worth much either. I recently inherited a bunch of stuff from my dad and as I've watched the various expert recommendations on them there seems to be no correlation between their "buy" and "sell" advice and what ends up happening with the stock. Right now we're in a booming market and that makes people look like geniuses who normally wouldn't look like geniuses.
Yeah, I'm not nearly smart enough to think I can beat the market. My investment strategy consists of tucking away what I can in index funds that charge few or no fees, and trying to forget about it, other than checking my statements when they come in. As far as single stocks go, I try not to to invest in stuff I know nothing about.
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Again, I'm not a sophisticated investor (although I'm trying to educate myself) and maybe this is something that has always been around and never went away to begin with, and I'm confused as to exactly what regulations were put in place during the Depression to prevent further crashes. Has been a while since my high school and college econ classes.
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So I have been looking at opening a brokerage account, and have been checking out my options. I've noticed in my research that a few places offer margin trading? I thought margin trading was one of the things that led to the stock market crash of 1929 and was either tightly regulated or outright banned at that point? I know that a lot of tihngs that they put in place to protect against another Great Depression (like the Glass-Steagall act) have been dismantled, so is this something that changed?
Anyone with more knowledge of this sort of thing want to explain to me why they might want to allow trading on margin again if it was regulated/banned at one point? Perhaps I'm mistaken and this has been around for a while. I have only really started investing in the last 8 years and am basically just parking my money in index funds, not trying to time the market or get fancy tracking an extensive portfolio.
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So for the time being I am working in v13 until I get my licensing issues sorted out.
I thought I would start a goldfish model, something simple to get some practice in and I am happily modeling away and I think to myself "I should save this".
So I got to File > Save Project as and I get a dialog with no place to input the name or hit "save". I can't resize it to get those things, either.
Any thoughts as to what might be going on? I may be using v13 for a few days yet and don't want to not be able to save my work.
I have posted a screen cap.
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Forgive my ignorance, but what is an .FBX and why would one want to convert it? I'm assuming it is an AM file format?
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Well, I get if it was an entirely new laptop but just one component? Would it have done the same thing if I changed the memory?
At any rate, I emailed support@hash.com so hopefully will be able to get this resolved soon. I guess I could just put the old drive back in, but that seems silly.
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Well I copied my master0.lic file from my external drive back over to my laptop, and I get the error "wrong host for license -4". Which confuses me as it is the same darn laptop, just with a bigger hard disk.
What am I doing wrong? Do I need to request a new license/activation key from Hash?
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And here I thought pinscreen animation was pretty hardcore:
http://techland.time.com/2013/05/01/tiny-t...e-out-of-atoms/
I think this beats that for sure.
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Yeah, I knew that. I had backed it up (or thought I had) to my flash drive. Which I found, btw, but it doesn't have the master0.lic file on it.
So I need to pull it off the other drive, just don't feel like dismantling my laptop to do it (just yet). So I'll make do with my old disc-based version of AM until I get round to it. Maybe I'll practice rigging or do some tutorials in the meantime, since I won't be able to access my v17 data.
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So why is it that your ability to find an item is always inversely proportional to your need to find that item?
I can't find my flash drive with my AM license backup, so now I will have to email Hash. I guess my other option is to put
my old HD back in my laptop for a bit and pull it off there.
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rodney, i offered my help for free, so i guess that tells how i feel about supporting hash in any way
Acknowledged. I wasn't trying to diminish your offer in any way.
On the other hand, I do my very best to encourage people NOT to work for free.
>
*I hope at least some of the content of the animation sinks in.
(Note that I do not agree with everything depicted in the animation. For instance, I think they've set the level of engagement too high on their chart. There is also an aspect where the engagement pyramid is inverted. This is especially true where communities of artists and animators retain high levels of individualism. In this sense the executive is the individual artist... and vice versa... as each individual gets their turn at being the creative head of their own project within their community.
Blah blah blah... "manage synergy", "cascade goals", "paradigm"....snooze. Bet you could sell a lot of seats to MBAs and PHBs with that seminar. Maybe I picked the wrong line of work.
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i tell you why a good homepage with professional looking images is so important. and i don´t mean a image-gallery, big images of high-quality renders in the background, that you will immediately see, when you visit the page. i don´t know how you do it, but when i hear about a software, that i might be interested in, i look for their homepage. if that´s what i see there looks kinda homemade and unprofessional, i might loose interest very quickly. if what i see there looks top notch, and the images display exactly the output i would like to create myself, i will stay and get more info about it. i don´t say that a new page gets hash loads of new customers, but it´s essential for the image of a company, especially when that company is a software company. if it´s not that important, like few of you´re saying, why are big companies spending huge amounts of money on their web-appearance? i will give you a hint: because it IS important.
and robert is right, the main reason why blender got so big is because it´s free. certainly not because it´s intuitive or better than others.
I guess I don't see what it is that is displayed on the web page that looks that bad? 90 percent of the stuff that is in the marquee or was in the old format looks just fine to me.
I get that everyone wants AM to be successful and there is a certain appeal to using what the "Hollywood pros" use. (There is a psychological term for this, the endowment effect, where an object takes on extra appeal because of who it is used by. A guitar owned and played by Jimi Hendrix is more valuable than one played by Joe Schmoe. It is the reason you see so many celebrity endorsements.)
However, the value in AM is that we are open to everyone. It isn't exclusionary. You don't have to take out a 2nd mortage on your house to afford your tools. Heck, all you would have to do to get the money for AM is one odd job every week for a month for $20, and you would have the money.
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Ah, crud. So the $995 is just the camera body, no lenses? To be expected, I guess. Wonder what you need to spend (not what you could spend, that is entirely different) on lenses to have a decent range of capabilities? As long as you didn't go crazy with lenses, you could still end up under $2k.
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Not sure I could tell my story in just one minute, that would be pretty rough.
Sure you can. In fact, it has been said that a good story should be able to be summarized in one sentence!
The real question then becomes... what do you do with that second minute.
An important concept to grasp in filmmaking is the difference between 'real time' and 'screen time'.
When we begin to recognize that we can span a story of millions of years within a few seconds this should start to sink in.
How to do it?
Distill the story down into it's very basic elements.
Who?
What?
When?
Why?
Where?
How?
(and my personal addition to the list) To what extent?
Dialogue is the real boogabear of filmmaking. Most of it is unnecessary.
Spend time distilling dialogue down into only what is required to be heard, and let the remainder be internal dialogue.
Transfer all other important dialogue elements into pantomime and performance (non verbal communication).
Show. Don't tell. An image is worth a thousand words. An animated sequence translates a thousand images. Etc. Etc.
Underlying thought: if you can fully distill your story down into two minutes then you can more easily expand that story out to 90 minutes by manipulating the story to alter the sense of time and emotional involvement on the part of the audience.
Consider that most movie trailers run less than one minute.
Teaser: 15-30 seconds
Trailer is 1- 1:30 seconds
Long Trailer: 1:30-2 minutes
A quick random sample of theatrical trailers yielded: 1:25, 2:05 and 1:46 seconds each respectively.
And get this.... the primary element missing from a trailer is the story's resolution.
That is the remaining 88 minutes of most 90 minute films.
But consider that in a comedy (or a punch line) the resolution of a story can conclude in about 2 seconds.
But really, why tell short stories?
Answer: So you can tell more stories or other tales with different characters.
Well, I'm golden there
No dialogue in my story at all. I'm planning on conveying everything through body language.
Maybe once I get down to it, 1 minute or a minute and a half will be more than enough. I won't know until I'm there.
I really need to do some kind of animatic, I think that will give me a better sense.
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A really nice bit of character animation worth analyzing:
qx1oyMUxmkc
Moral of the story: 'Never mess with the animators'
Note the length of this 'story'.
In my estimation, this is about as long as most A:M projects created by lone individuals should be (i.e. not more than 2 minutes in total length)
In fact it is probably a bit longer and more involved than many lone projects would need to be.
The 3 fingers are different. Was expecting 4 but they make it work.
Not sure I could tell my story in just one minute, that would be pretty rough.
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This is getting OT but most print media's dreams of just moving and setting up shop on the web seem not to have not worked out for mot of them. No one want's to pay for anything (witness how $79 for A:M seems to be a hard sell) and the online advertisers can't be worth much either.
I can't figure out how anyone makes it work at all.
Giving people the benefit of the doubt, the reluctance to spend on anything (especially anything online or something that is perceived as having zero production cost beyond the initial investment (movies, music, micro-code) may have more to do with wages being flat for the last 30 or 40 years, adjusted for inflation, than anything else.
Back to my initial query, I did manage to find www.3dartistonline.com but it does not seem to be the same publication as 3dartist.com (the defunct wone that I remember as having more AM content).
They seem to be doing ok but I suppose could be struggling. I'll have to see about getting a subscription, the newsstand price is pretty brutal.
One thing that strikes me as odd, has anyone noticed the UK publications generally seem to be better quality (more how-to articles, better content in general) whereas the US publications are more like nothing but ads? I realize they have to pay the bills but when 90% of the magazine is ad content, that is an awful lot.
This is veering off-topic again but I think that computer magazine hobbyist publications took a wrong turn once they started catering to the bean counting crowd as opposed to the engineering/hacker types (think Byte turning into a publication cheerleading for MS Office when they used to have actual articles on programming and stuff).
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It's been a while since I saw a magazine cover A:M, but it's been even longer since I've bought such a magazine.
Maybe someone just needs to hit them up with a proposal for a series on A:M
Well, this sorta ties back in with the "let's do something with AM" thread. I think the impression is that outside of our little community AM has fallen off the map.
I haven't bought a 3d print publication in a while, I think a lot of the old magazines that catered to that market went under. Last time I was in the local bookstore, the only thing
I remember seeing was Photoshop magazines and maybe one design magazine, but nothing geared to animation or CG animation specifically.
It may just be that those niche publications aren't very profitable, and with regular print publications going under for lack of readership they may never return.
Maybe they'll move to the web, seems like you could charge a low monthly rate and still serve up the same content but for much lower cost than what it would take to run a print publication.
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I'll have to do a forum search and see what I can find.
I think the tutorials off the main page are just the Art of AM
stuff. I wish I had downloaded more of this stuff
when it was easier to find.
Thanks
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Are there any 3d magazines out there that feature AM tutorials on a regular basis? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is 3d Design, but not sure they have much AM content. 3D artist was pretty good way back, but they are no longer published and while there is still a web presence it appears largely defunct.
I ask because I would like to find a source for small projects (something that could be completed in an hour or two) that would keep my skills honed on the days that lose steam on my movie.
Thanks
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Possum's don't like loud music, put a boom-box in the basement on an out of range rock station so it's staticy, and let it blare for 3-4 hours... once the critter is out... seal him out.
I'll have to remember that for the next time my parents have one in their garage.
My computer case has to support two cats...
Ok, you can't post a pic of two kitties and not tells us their names.
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I have a possum in my cellar.
You want to rent out my dog? They are supposed to be good vermin hunters. Not sure how I'd get him to Texas, though.
As for possums, I can't stand 'em. They hit every branch on the ugly tree on the way down.
Project Pinocchio
in Off Topic
Posted
So am I not understanding something here, or are these nifty tools more or less useless for our purposes, since they aren't able to export any motion or rigging data to a format AM can use? Or am I completely mistaken but there is a way to do it?